Download Anything to Declare?: The Searching Tales of an HM Customs by Jon Frost PDF

In greater than twenty years, Jon Frost has labored with the mad, the undesirable, the courageous, the silly, the astonishing, and the heroic. In his time as a uniformed officer Jon seized presidential airplane, a operating tank, automobiles, lorries, boats, and coffins; and exposed wild animals, killer snakes, bush meat, animal porn, toxic vodka, dodgy medication, bootleg prescriptions, pirated capsules, poisonous alcohol, firearms, side-arms, swords, explosives, stolen gold, soiled cash, blood diamonds, baby pornography, and each drug recognized to guy and some as but unknown ones. And the lifeless? He searched them, too. whilst you’ve confiscated every little thing from a suitcase complete human hair to a dwell monkey hidden within the lining of someone’s overcoat, you recognize you could by no means go back to a typical line of labor. yet then Jon went into undercover customs paintings, and issues turned fairly fascinating . . .

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Extra info for Anything to Declare?: The Searching Tales of an HM Customs Officer

Sample text

By now, the commercial jets above me weren’t the only incoming flights I had to deal with. Obviously word, and the smell, had got round the local area and there seemed to be a busy flight path of flies and insects circling the car and making their approach for landing. Well, serves me right, I thought – the curiosity of the Customs officer strikes again. Trust me to have a butcher’s and find . . what looked like a butcher’s. That’ll teach you, Jon, you nosy, suspicious old bastard. I was just glad that, technically, this was actually nothing to do with Customs.

There aren’t many chuckles to be had in the VAT Act. The training was hard and intense and we were expected to learn quickly. There is a reason for this: HMCE was regarded as the best Customs service in the world. I trained with all sorts, from the mad and the bad to the whip-smart and disciplined – drawn from all walks of life for all kinds of reasons. The training hammers us all into shape and then nails us into a stiff black (though officially ‘Customs Blue’) uniform with bright gold braid and scary peaked cap (ominous X-ray stare, officer’s own).

It was the kind of aircraft that would make you want to rediscover the joys of train travel. So, every time the Bulgarian flight arrived, myself and a few other officers would go out on the tarmac and wait for it. The reason for the rare occasion of a Customs officer stepping outside the channels was twofold. First, the boarding officer had to be there to inspect the weapons in the cockpit. I have no idea why the pilots carried a couple of pistols, locked in a safe, as no hijacker in their right mind would want to hold up this bucket airline – and if they did their first ransom demand would have been to get the plane to a repair shop.